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Two-Tier Internet & The End of Freedom of Speech
Max Fomitchev writes "The proposed Two-Tier Internet bill threatens not only to raise prices on goods and services served online but also to seriously hamper free speech on Internet by allowing telecom providers choking user pages and blogs not associated with major content providers. What a perfect way of censorship..."
QUOTE:
"While Net Neutrality bill sounds like overkill, two-tier Internet bill is ought to be stopped too. If it passes freedom of speech would be seriously hampered, startups and small businesses will take a hit and we will pay higher prices for online advertising as well as goods and services delivered or sold over Internet. Do we really want that? I think not."
His conclusions in the article are dead on correct. Though I disagree with his opinion on net-neutrality.
The beauty of the internet, in my opinion, is it's ability to link people together while allowing an even playing field for small business. These have been the greatest social and economic impact points of the new technology era. Sadly, once it becomes tiered it also becomes discriminatory based on economic factors.
Sure, your blog can be seen, but if it get's too popular you'll have to pay more...
Sure, you can start a small business, but if it get's too busy you'll have to pay more...
The idea that no one "owns" the net itself should be inviolate. I already am charged for the bandwidth that comes off my servers because of the cost incurred by my ISP for upstream bandwidth.
A tiered internet would be the same as keeping the peasants out of libraries. It's a huge step *backwards*.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
REDACTED
This content is not on your Premium Plan.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Only the government can "censor" anyone. ISPs routinely "censor" content, and have no restrictions on doing so.
Remember: Your right to "free speech" does NOT come with a corresponding right to be heard.
Else why don't I have my own late-night talk show on a major network?
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Since many a blogger rails hardest against corporations and their associated ilk, it makes sense for them tot ry and limit it. What is in the interest of business is a society whose information comes from marketers.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Blogger with crap beard rants incoherently about Freedom.
Film at 11.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
telcos argue that they want to curb proliferation of online video and other types of data-hungry streaming that allegedly taxes their networks they think imposing traffic fees on content providers would be a fair solution. So ISP's (not TELCO's since not all ISP's are necessarily TELCO's) want to impose sort of a private highway fee for passing bandwidth through their networks... Its surprising to see which one of these clowns will be the first to stick it to the next one. Since all networks rely on another one to pass their information through their pipes (peering), I wonder how long before one de-peers with another and breaks the Internet again (see: Who broke *.org).
I wonder what idiotic government officials while having their pockets greased will do their emails no longer come in but instead they receive a hostage notification from their provider: Dear Mr. President, under subsection 1(a)(b)(c)(d)(e) of the Draconian Telecommunications Act, we cannot deliver today's messages. Please pay the sum of a) bandwidth b) tax fees c) attorney fees d) greaser fees in order to release your messages.
Infiltrated dot Net
There are quite a few people out there - not just representatives of the telecommunications industry - under the impression that "Government Intervention Is Bad", hence we should all oppose network neutrality legislation. But this bill underscores the fact that government intervention by itself isn't necessarily bad - it's how government intervenes that determines whether the right or wrong thing is being done.
So let's all drop this nonsense about claiming that the government shouldn't be intervening in how the Internet works, and get back to the core of the matter - which is whether the telecommunications industry should be allowed to leverage its oligopoly position in the broadband ISP market to extract profit from content providers that don't even connect to them directly, and whether the industry should be allowed to discriminate based on traffic type and content, rather than pricing by bandwidth consumption alone.
Put the fear of god in them. Do not let them take this lightly. For this is YOUR ass on the plate.
Read radical news here
Unless you have not heard, Verizon, AT&T, Bell South and other telecommunications giants are lobbying Congress to establish a legal basis for charging website owners for traffic with the help of two-tier Internet.
Sweet. So as long as we haven't heard about it, they're not actually doing it??? Then WTH is Slashdot doing, posting this crap and ruining the Internet for all of us?
1. From a "free speech" point of view, how is this any different than than your local newspaper's editorial policy? Some newspapers just won't print some kinds of content, even if the author is willing to pay for the service.
2. Does this form of content limitation take away any of the rights you had before the dawn of email? Back in the day, we wrote pen & paper letters because it was the only option. Today, although letters are (probably) more secure, because they are not subject to the kind of keyword data mining that can be conducted on electronic communications, we seem stuck on email. Do we need to be?
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
What happens if I happen to access a US server? Will my ISP be charged extra for the services offered by the website? If yes I think all US centric websites are screwed. The content will just move to international waters like most US MNC's who are incorporated in tax free zones. The internet does not revolve around the US you know.
I really wish the government could just let well enough alone instead of completely fucking up the economy by way of fucking up the internet.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Why is it assumed that the internet is the common property of all mankind? Certainly the infrastructure owned by governments around the world is held to one standard, but why do we assume that verizon, quest, etc somehow "owe" us? The internet is a commercial entity. Laying all that fiber was paid for (mostly) by companies expecting a reasonable ROI. The way to voice your opinion is with your wallet. Cancel your service.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
So with this what's the difference between the USA and China? We are supposed to have Freedom of Speech, but I guess not.
The difference is that in China, you've got the central government blocking/filtering (and arresting/jailing) based on the content of the communication. What you say triggers their actions.
In the case being discussed, the content of your blog (your speech) or the content of some streaming media spooling off of a small company's server (as opposed to, say, AOL's or Google's) have nothing to do with it. Censorship isn't even part of the discussion. What's being talked about is who pays for the bandwidth being used. That's it. Period. If Google wants to make billions of dollars by being the go-to search engine for millions of Verizon's customers, then Verizon has every reason to place a premium on that gigantic peering arrangement.
If a little mom-and-pop web site starts getting a ton of traffic from a Slashdotting, do you really think that their monthly costs don't go up? Who should pay for that... the ISP providing their pipe? How are they causing the Slashdotting? But it's the ISP's resources that have to suddently carry all of that traffic, and that comes at the expense of other capacity. This isn't about censorship, it's about the economic realities of the fact that huge IP pipes aren't a natural occuring resource - they're mostly built and run by private companies. You can talk all you want, about anything you want. But why should you be able to dictate to some other ISP how much of your traffic they should have to carry, and at what price?
If you don't like the price they charge, you change carriers. If you don't like any of the prices available (meaning, you don't like the market), then become your own carrier (and see just how willing you are to maintain an artificial pricing scheme when "one way" traffic on certain peering connections account for the vast majority of your day's work and financial costs).
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
See that's where you're assuming wrong. The ISP market is not competitive and free. It's an oligopaly. The only choice customers will have is to either get broadband or not.
I don't know about you, but I am HIGHLY suspicious of the government's ability to do anything sensical when it comes to technology, and I can think of nothing worse than a law being passed to correct some theoretical problem that DOESN'T CURRENTLY EXIST and might never exist.
What would happen if Congress tried to pass some Net Neutrality Law? Since there isn't any kind of ACTUAL problem now, I'm sure the bill would undoubtedly screw stuff up through the law of unintended consequences.
Congress would insert all kinds of special provisions that would benefit some group at the expense of others, all kinds of new technology would become illegal, and lawsuits would proliferate. Who knows what would happen, the point is that when congress acts on technology (eg. the DMCA) they are likely to create a huge mess and things better be PRETTY DAMN bad before Congress can do more good than harm.
That's it. I'm sending in the ninjas.
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
This isn't about price per volume. The NN legislation (SFAIK) does not limit a provider's ability to charge what ever they like for volume. The legislation is designed to prevent the re-ordering of packets based on a tiered service plan.
For example, I get 75gigs of transfer on my site for $15/month. For every 5gig block above that I have to cough up another $5. So if I transfer 4 gigs, it's $15. 60 gigs, still $15. 100 gigs, $40. 500 gigs, $440.
For example, the NN legislation would prevent my provider from saying that in addition to my bandwidth costs I would have to pay $25/month for a 'QoS' guarantee or face 10% more timeouts for my customers and 150% page load times.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I've got to say, I have trouble with charging content providers even once, so I completely agree with this criticism of the proposed "revenue enhancing" technologys for the megacorps.
I used to post commentary to Salon's TableTalk until they changed their revenue policy to charge people who posted stuff for the right to post. People who posted stuff? They're a magazine. It seems absurd to charge writers but not subscribers. So I left. Obviously it didn't bring the empire down, but my point was to say "look, I'm not going to pay two ways: one by providing content and another by providing money to have that content delivered". People come to the site to read posts, and they charge advertisers for that. Getting readers is enough payment for me.
Similarly here, I think it's amazing that if you have a web site that is full of content, the internet has no mechanism to make sure you are economically rewarded. The promise of micropayments for having put up very elaborate sites full of information was never carried through because the big portal sites realized they could just take all that money for themselves--why pass it through? No one cares that it's my or your commentary that people are getting out of their browser. They just thank AOL or MSN or Google for finding it for them. And we who provide the myriad little details, blogs, maps, lists, and other things that make up the real fabric of the internet are not only not rewarded but are charged.
So when you talk about double-charging for that privilege, not single-charging, at some point I have to say everyone should go read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged , in which something very similar occurs, and what amount to "content providers" eventually say "enough is enough". Ayn Rand is controversial for her overall broad philosophy of Objectivism, which lots of people don't buy into wholesale. But I'm not advancing Objectivism here. I'm just saying the basic premise of the book, that sometimes enough is enough, is worth considering. The book is an interesting read regardless of your position on her larger scale philosophies.
And I'm all for creating reasonable fees on the Internet. I just don't think authors and other content providers should be charged for doing so. That's the very definition of not reasonable. Sort of like having kids charge their parents for raising them. Or charging teachers for the privilege of teaching. If no one reads the content someone provides, the cost of that content approaches zero since it's just a few bytes on an unused disk. If lots of people read them, then by definition the content contributes a lot to the world, and the world should contribute by each consumer chipping in, not by each consumer contributing to the content provider's eventual bankruptcy (or in less severe cases just negatively contributing to their financial success).
Also, I like Jesse Ventura's "government should do for people what they cannot do for themselves". The big portal companies are already capable of a great many sins; the mere presence of money enables that. What the law needs to protect are the individual content providers, who are not capable of protecting themselves because often they are denied (or made to work unreasonably hard for) any revenue stream from their efforts. If there's a need for a law, it's to protect the little guy, not to enable the big one.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Freedom of speech is violated when there are legal consequences from government for saying what you think. This is not that. We had freedom of speech before the internet even existed, I don't see how we're losing it with a tiered system. Don't misunderstand, I don't agree with or like the "tiered" internet approach, but this hyperbolic language about what is and is not a loss of basic human rights is not conductive to the debate. It trivializes TRUE abuses and suspensions of human rights, and clouds the issue in people's minds. When people don't understand what something is, they can't make intelligent decisions about it.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
I got an email (genuine, not spam) from EBay this morning encouraging users to write to congress about this. It links you to this page: http://www.ebaymainstreet.com/takeaction/?campaign _id=neutrality1
There's nothing wrong with paying more for better service, for example a connection to a bigger pipe. That being said, this isn't what's happening. Rather, it's that you would be forced to pay for a transit-party (between you, your own ISP, and the client connecting to your site) to not degrade the regular connection. The problem is, that the connection has already been paid for. On the end of the client... to their ISP by them. If they don't want to pay for a higher-speed connection, then with dial-up or low-speed they will get overall lower performance. Fair enough
On your end, you have bandwidth and pipe limits imposed by your ISP. If you want more, you pay for the bigger package. Again, it depends on what service contract you choose.
What should not happen, is that the client's ISP will bill you (after the client is already paying for service) not to choke off your access. This also applies to the midpoints in the connection, and somebody has already footed the bill.
It's double-dipping, and it's extortion. It also strays far from the concept of an ISP being somewhat of a common carrier, and shows blatently that the can (and will abuse the ability to) monitor and/or restrict specific traffic.
If this passes it will be a dark day for the internet indeed... but if it does my hopes are that the first ones to try it will be hammered so mercilessly (lost customers, complaints, legislation, and banner ads everywhere proclaiming to existing customers that their ISP is evil) that the idea will quickly lose it's appeal.
That being said, perhaps we can create a master-pool of ISP's that use said service. In that case we could create something similiar to an anti-spam list wherein customers will get a memo stating "connections to this site will suffer extremely slowness and loss of quality because your ISP 'ASSHATINTERNETCO' is limiting your connection. Click here [link] for more information". I'd be happy to pop those up on my site, and it's easy enough with SHTML, etc.
Anyone in?
The pro-freedom approach would be to let fiber owners (telcoms) charge whomever and whatever they want to use the lines that THEY OWN. If these telcos start charging content providers, the cost may be shifted to users, but new companies would start laying more fiber to grab some of the profits, and the increased competition would bring prices back down in the long run. Plus, there'd be a lot more line capacity out there, which would not happen with "net neutrality".
If it were up to this guy, bookstores couldn't charge different prices for different books--that would amount to abridging "freedom to read" by his logic.
Freedom of speech means you can speak freely. It DOES NOT mean that you are entitled to be provided with the means (internet, microphone, megaphone) to speak.
Also: at the 3rd paragraph, this guy admits he's a socialist, so his credibility to talk about freedom is GONE.
Um, buy a DVD lately. How about watch Comcast's on-demand - the 'free offerings' you pay for as part of your digital package ... yeah they added commercials to the start of them and I don't recall the price of either coming down.
By the way, not once have I seen anything from a telco on 2 Tier internet where they are garaunteeing anything but best effort even if you pay. So technically, they can flag you high QoS priority at the peerpoint and ignore you after that. You pay them more, they give you a nifty flag on your packets that nobody sees.
Let's not forget that the Internet, and computers in general, have all been developed almost exclusively at public expense for most of their lifetimes, and by all rights should remain in the public sector.
...
/ stories/14253975.htm
"As Andrew L Shapiro, a contributing editor of the Nation, wrote in July, 1995: ``You probably didn't notice, but the Internet was sold a few months ago. Well, sort of. The US Federal Government has been gradually transferring the backbone of the US portion of the global computer network to companies such as IBM and MCI as part of a larger plan to privatize cyberspace. But the crucial step was taken on April 30, 1995, when the National Science Foundation shut down its part of the Internet, which began in the 1970s as a Defence Department communications tool. That left the corporate giants in charge....''
The telecommunication infrastructure was largely created at Government initiative for about 30 years, including both hardware and software, then handed over to private corporations in 1995. It is true that so-called `private' corporations (meaning, profit is privatized, though cost and risk are largely socialized) were often instrumental in R&D, but typically under Government contract. The basic ideas came from the public sector, as did the funding. That includes the Web, designed at CERN, but in the US the public contribution was overwhelming, as in the case of computers and electronics generally, in fact most of high tech. The system was run by the Pentagon, later the National Science Foundation (NSF). The real question should be the opposite: Why should private corporations be granted a huge gift by the public (which is unaware that it has done so)."
http://www.hinduonnet.com/businessline/2000/07/25
Freedom of speech is freedom from the government controlling what is said. It is NOT freedom from all entities to control what is said in all situations. In fact a big part of freedom of speech is the freedom to do just that. A newspaper nor anyone else can not be forced to transmit speech by another. There is a big difference between China's government controlling speech and a US company choosing to to transmit speech by another.
That being said, it is important for the internet to include access to all sites. Companies providing access should not make access content dependent except under extreem circumstances (Phishing, child porn, etc.) Internet providers should be required to provide access to all sites while individual sites should have the right to restrict speech as they see fit.
In other words, let's say I send a phone call through Skype's servers. I'm not paying any more to my telco or cableco for them to do this. I'm just paying Skype and Skype is paying their own ISP, not my local ISP, even though my local ISP is carrying all the extra traffic load. This is especially galling for the Telco because this used to be revenue at $ 0.05 a minute and now it's not giving them one thin dime, even though they are providing the bandwidth for it to happen!
You ARE paying your ISP for the bandwidth already. That's that monthly "unlimited access" fee you pay to your ISP. Skype is paying their ISP, and the person on the other end is paying their ISP, if it's an IP to IP call. Everyone is already being paid for moving IP packets. If you are moving too many packets over your ISP, they should charge you, not Skype. Your ISP knows you want to use Skype, but will leave and go to another ISP if they raise your rates, so they extort money from Skype to be allowed to provide you a service you are already paying your ISP for, moving IP packets from your address to another and vice versa.
and here is the link:
h tml
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/opinion/28sun3.
IMO, the New York Times says it better, but, hey, that's just me.
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
"Net Neutrality" is an attempt by the Telcos to shift their problem to the backs of content providers and end users, leaving nothing but profit for them.
Let's take an example. Verizon and Google seem to be popular. Let's say Google is hosted with AT&T. So now we have Verizon's customers using their bandwidth to access Google on AT&T's network, and not getting any money for it. This in and of itself is false. The customers pay for the access, and if they didn't use it for Google then they would use it elsewhere. Since AT&T is the funnel for the traffic from all other ISPs, they charge Google a large amount. It seems like everyone got their money -- AT&T from Google and Verizon from its customers.
If there were an imbalance it would be up to the ISPs to negotiate between themselves. The content providers pay their bandwidth fees to provide the content and the users pay their fees to get access to everything any content provider (from blogs to Amazon) wish to offer.
I had trouble coming up with an imbalance in this equation, but let's say that somehow the user's bandwidth usage to access Google's content drives Verizon's finances into the red, while AT&T is making a mint. In this case I would say that Verizon needs to negotiate some sort of equalization payment from AT&T that would sound like Verizon to AT&T: "Pay me some relief for all this traffic or I will block access to your network from mine".
The advantage here is that the ISP's problem remains their problem, and doesn't move to any scapegoat(s). There is no tiered network, since the costs would be balanced on a monthly/quaterly/yearly/what-have-you basis.
If there is a two-tier Internet, where video and telephony applications are on the top tier and web sites, email and most other services are on the bottom, it really doesn't seem unfair to me. In fact, it might vastly improve the quality of the top-tier applications to the point where we would be a great deal happier with them than we are now. Surely this is not so bad?
It's unfair because I already paid for a certain quality of service on my end, and for all the bandwidth I use. If the telcos are having problems filling their end of the contract, they should raise prices to meet their actual costs, not try to extort money from the people on the other end of the connection. When I signed up for an account, I did so with the assumption that I was paying more than enough to cover the bandwidth they promised me, and that I would receive any and all data I chose to request at equal speed (at least as far as they can control). They are now trying to break that contract by delivering data that I request at less bandwidth than I am paying them for, unless the guy on the other end pays protection money.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
The whole thing is really a tradeoff - lower prices for targeted, sponsored content. It's like TV - you can pay for commercial-free content, or be cheap about it and be forced to watch commercials.
You're still getting gouged.
Public memory is short. You may not remember this, but when cable TV was first introduced, the whole idea was that you were essentially paying for the privilege of not watching commercials. After all, cable was supported by you, the viewer, and not advertisers. They've since introduced premium channels. Now you pay to watch commercials on cable and pay for premium channels. Advertising is starting to slip in there as well.
I see this as no different than the introduction of cable. Eventually, they will split it into an n-tier internet, with the highest level being the web equivalent of a premium channel. When they want to extort more money they will just add another tier.
pig fuckers.
That's ok, Jesus likes me anyway.
Too many people on the net? Don't want to spend valuable time and money switching to IPv6? Tired of those pirating commies sucking up your bandwidth to download pornography? Then alienate your customers off the internet! Yes, that's right. With the new Two-Tier Internet bill, you can block whatever content you wish from the prying eyes of the paying public! Anti-Rogers sites, anti-Bell sites, all gone! And with fewer people on the internet, you won't even need IPv6! So long, comrade! This is America, the land of the free! The Internet will be exactly like television, and now with the Two-Tiered Internet Bill, you can make sure that those cheapskate commies stay off those Anti-Bush sites for good! Vote for the Two-Tiered Internet Bill today! After all, the rich only get richer!
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
I'd like to see the Internet remain a many-to-many medium, even for video and audio content.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Your assumption is grossly incorrect in that it assumes the bitrate needed to encode telephone speech with "acceptable" quality is the same as encoding music with "Near CD quality." Bitrates for VoIP typically range in the 4-16kbps range, which is considerably less than even low quality streaming radio at 56kbps.
isomerica.net | Foonetic IRC
Here's a concrete example: say that today Skype can afford to charge $10/month for VOIP, and Bellsouth can only afford to charge $15/month to provide their own VOIP service. You are paying $40/month for Bellsouth's "unlimited" DSL, and want to get VOIP service. You sign up for Skype, so now you're paying $50/month.
Well, now the net neutrality bill fails, and Bellsouth starts charging Skype a fee to connect to you at a reasonable rate. Say, for example, it's $5/month/user. Since businesses are never perfectly efficient (e.g. Skype has to hire an extra employee to manage the Bellsouth extortion fee), Skype is forced to raise its rate by $7/month. Suddenly, Bellsouth's own VOIP is $2 cheaper, and it's because it happens to have a monopoly over the regulated infrastructure that is the network.
Now, is this fair? Should Bellsouth be allowed to do it? I say, Hell no! And that's why we need network neutrality.
Now, as for Free Speech: if ISPs are allowed to do this at all, there's no limit on the criteria used to implement it. It doesn't matter that text-based sites use (relatively) negligable bandwidth; a pro-Republican ISP could still (for example) throttle Democratic websites down to 2400 bits per second. Also, as time goes on media like sound and video will be used more and more on the Internet for all things, including political speech. Even now, how many videos on YouTube or Google Video do you think are political? What if the next JibJab election video is live-action, instead of a Flash animation?
And that's not even mentioning the fact that the paperwork for all this protection money will be a nightmare for web businesses to manage because they'll effectively have to bribe every ISP on the planet, or the fact that as technology progresses and bandwidth increases this will become a non-issue anyway (in the same way that CPU speed is a non-issue nowadays for most casual users -- I'm aware that there will always be some groups that need all the bandwidth available, no matter how much there is. No "640K ought to be enough for everyone" posts, please).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
...Hey, lets get our townships, counties, and other municipalities to charge the ISPs for usage of local land to run their lines. AFter all, why should I let them run their lines accross my property and not get a cut of the profits. :)
Then perhaps the ISPs should not be offering it anymore.
Do you know how an all-you-can-eat-buffet works, from the business point of view ? It works because, on average, a customer pays the restaurant owner more than it cost the owner to make that meal. However, sometimes a large (or just gluttonous) person or even a group of such persons comes, sits down and starts eating. They eat and eat and eat, and end up costing way more than they paid. Can the owner then, after they have eaten, say: "By the way, by "all you can eat" I really meant only a limited amount, and since you ate more, you'll have to eat more" ?
No, of course he can't. He sold unlimited meal, he can't redefine that words meaning afterwards. If those persons come eating often, then the owner will simply have to switch to stop offering an unlimited meal, or perhaps increase his rates to keep making money.
Why on Earth would the ISPs be allowed to lie on their offers either ?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
You misunderstand the telco's position. Say I subscribe to Cox HSI for my Internet connection. I pay Cox every month for my connection and bandwidth. Google connects to the Internet through Level3. Google pays Level3 every month for their connection. What the telcos want is for Google to pay Cox for the bandwidth used when I search using Google. Yes, that's in addition to what I'm paying Cox, and what Google's paying Level3. And yes, it does in fact involve charging someone who's nto a customer. The penalty for not paying would be that traffic to and from Google gets an effectively lower priority on Cox's network, making Google slow compared to sites that're paying. The telcos say they won't penalize non-paying traffic, just give priority to paying traffic. It amounts to the same thing, though. Whether a gas station charges $3.00/gallon for cash with a 10-cent surcharge for paying by credit card or $3.10/gallon with a 10-cent discount for paying with cash, the end result's exactly the same.
It is not economically feasible to run pipes to everyone. Most places in the US have such an arrangement (tax subsidies/etc). Once the pipes are in place however the carriers want to start abusing the situation. Since possession is 9/10-ths, for the most part they get their way.
It is disingenuous to imply that anyone could go out tomorrow and just recreate much of this infrastructure with private funds.
The several competing providers who have chosen to set up in my area are trying very hard to win me over, always offering better deals and counter-deals on bandwidth.
Understand your situation is unique, not the norm. I have lived in several major cities, and several different urban areas in the last few years. The most I have ever seen in any place at once is 2. The phone carrier (about whom you had no choice), and the cable operator (who you also had no choice about). Most places I have lived had just one choice.
ou have only your locally elected people to blame for a less competitive environment
To be fair, it has more to do with population density than elected officials. When your local government subsidizes pipe because it is uneconomical for a company to do it, it is not reasonable that the company then gets a monopoly over it. Through lobbying, and because it is prohibitively expensive to lay down extra lines, most companies have managed to get a monopoly in any given area.
Recognizing that a third party is routing an enormous portion of their traffic over your finite network, and making a lot of money doing so, does make talking to that user about traffic optimization a very legitimate objective.
This logic is flawed. Without their content no one would want your pipes. It seems to me equally fair that the ISP should have to pay Google for helping it's customers find what they want on the network. Google is providing your customers incentive to buy your product at no cost to you. How is that fair? If all these terrible content production companies were not creating content, no one would want your network.
A common carrier like UPS, you mean?
Exactly like UPS. UPS does not get to double charge everyone. One side pays the price, they deliver the product. UPS does not get to collect my $10 shipping fee, then tell Amazon that if they do not also pay them they will intentionally delay the delivery of my package. If it costs more to deliver my package to me in one place than another, UPS will charge me more, not go to Amazon.
You suffer from the delusion that Google is the local ISP's customer. They are not. The user requesting the information is your customer, and he is already paying you for that service. Google owes you nothing.
If your customers want Google to be tiered then that is between you and the customers. It is in your best interest to give your customers better access to the content they want, not visa-versa.
The reason ISP's want this is for the opposite reason. It gives them bundling control many of them are traditionally used to having. Bundling phone service for example. Either Vonage pays us to provide phone service to our customers (and we make money by leveraging one product for another), or we drop you and get someone else (or themselves) to do it.
It is never in the customers best interest to be told what is best for them based on who gives the carrier the most amount of money. The only reason they can get away with this is because most of them do have a monopoly in any given area so the customers can't choose something less draconian. If this were not the case I would agree that market forces would work this out.
This is not an issue of your rights online. It is a battle between two enormous business groups: Internet providers and content providers. Neither of them has your interests at heart! Both groups are primarily motivated by maximizing their own profits. They are using you and manipulating you in order to try to further their business goals.
I don't love my ISP any more than the next guy, but let me make a brief counter to all the propaganda from Google and Ebay and MSN about the "greedy" ISPs (of course, Google etc. are just in business to extend love and butterflies and puppies throughout the world).
The way people pay for and get charged for the Internet has changed over time. It used to be that many of us had to pay by the minute, or even by the byte. That has mostly disappeared, but we still pay more for better service. Not everyone has the same options for Internet access, and even if they do have the same options not everyone can afford the same access. Internet access is a business, and a relatively new one. Business models are evolving and there is no guarantee that today's model is the perfectly optimal, best possible way that people could pay for Internet access.
It might be that if ISPs could get some money from content providers, they would charge their customers less. Of course, they would not do this out of the goodness of their hearts (they have no hearts!), but rather for the same business reasons that they stopped their per-minute and per-byte charges. ISPs exist in a competitive business environment like other companies and ultimately they need to satisfy their customers.
It might even be that in the future, Internet access could be free. It would effectively be subsidized by the big content companies, which ultimately get their income from ads. Free access to Internet content could be supported by advertising. It has worked with other media and it's possible it could work for the net too. But the only way it can happen is if ISPs, which bear the cost of end-user access, are able to get some of the revenues from the companies that are offering the ads.
That's really what this battle is all about. I don't know how it will come out, but I do know that when good ol' Meg from Ebay suddenly wants me to write my congresswoman about an issue that, coincidentally, would protect the huge profits Meg is earning, her motive is not to benefit me. Meg doesn't actually ask my opinion all that often. She's not on the phone wishing me happy birthday or asking how's the family. No, her interests are not mine. She is looking to protect her company's profits and she is trying to influence me and use me in this political battle against Comcast and other ISPs.
You'd still be charged $X but Google would be charged $N for no good reason.
That is already the case: try out the following.
Call up your local telco, introduce yourself as Joe Schmoe geek that wants a real connection. Call again as the CIO of Schmoe.com Inc. and order the exact same thing.
The difference is usually upwards of 5x the price, simply for being a company. The future you fear is already business as usual. Welcome to the real world.